John Ramsey, the father of JonBenet Ramsey, believes new testing could finally solve the case that has haunted his family for nearly 30 years. JonBenet was only six years old when she was murdered in the basement of her home in Boulder, Colorado, on December 26, 1996.
Her mother had reported her missing earlier that morning and found a ransom note demanding $118,000. The little girl was later found beaten and strangled with a garrote. At first police looked at the parents and even her brother, but the family was eventually cleared.
In 2008 investigators said DNA at the scene pointed to an unknown male. Now at 81, Ramsey spoke at a crime convention with longtime family attorney Hal Haddon.
Haddon said: “I have pressed hard for DNA analysis of the knots in this garrote, which our DNA experts say could be quite promising, because someone had to tie those – and they’re fairly sophisticated. Someone had to use their fingers and likely got their DNA in these knots. They’ve never done that [testing], and I questioned them on that every time that we’ve met.”
He also pointed out that the wooden handle of the garrote was never tested for DNA, even though splinters from it were found on JonBenet. Haddon described the ransom note as elaborate and said: “Someone had obviously been in your home or had cased it thoroughly. Someone spent an extraordinary amount of time writing a ransom note which quoted extensively from murder movies which were contemporary in the day – movies like Dirty Harry.”
Last year Ramsey said there had been two breakthroughs as the family pushed for forensic genealogy to be used on DNA from the scene. While Haddon said solving it without that type of testing would be highly unlikely, Ramsey was more positive.
He said: “I believe there’s a 70 per cent chance we get an answer. We may not, but the odds are very high that we can. This new technology that’s been employed finding these old killers, old cold cases, is a dramatic improvement over the last testing that was done in our case, which was eight or 10 years ago.”
He added that with new technology and investigators he was more hopeful than ever.
